by Anna Roberts
“Our child, Ruby,” he said. “He’s going to be a whole lot of why. He’s going to shine with it.”
I don’t want you anywhere near my baby. Her heart roared, and for a second she thought she’d found another why, one bigger and older than him, but the instinct only lit the touchpaper of her own greed and she found herself thinking that if she stayed put just long enough to learn his secrets then maybe she could banish him forever.
His phone rang. Once more tongues clicked across the restaurant as he fished it out and frowned at the screen. It kept on ringing. He didn’t know what to do.
“Press that button,” she said, her voice a hitch in the back of her oyster-slimed throat.
Yael raised the phone to his ear with a smile. “Hello, Sister Blue,” he said.
6
The rain had stopped and the laundry needed hanging. No rest for the wicked witch. Or the good witch, or any witch for that matter. Over the centuries they’d tortured witches, hung them from gallows or burned them at stakes, but Blue couldn’t thinking they should have handed out medals instead. These women had carried the various cans, buckets and slop pails of pre-industrial domesticity and yet apparently still found the time to curse a cow or make baby toads fall from a preacher’s lying mouth.
She was glad of something boring to do. As she shook out the crumpled clothes she once again tuned her ears to the background murmur of the woods, but there was nothing there. The ghosts hadn’t returned.
Blue heard a twig snap and jumped, but it was only Axl, caught in the middle of an unsuccessful sneak back towards the house. Although his wolf-self was one of the most terrifying things Blue had ever seen, human Axl was every inch a fifteen year old, still stumbling through the exquisitely painful process of settling into one’s own skin. He gave her a wide berth as he skirted the edge of the yard, but she was downwind and she had an ex-smoker’s nose for tobacco. She caught his eye and arched a brow.
“What?” he said.
“You know what I’m gonna say; it’s hell to quit, so quit now.”
She expected him to snort and go on his way, but he pressed his lips tight over whatever retort he might have been thinking and instead shuffled over to the washing line. He fished a t-shirt from the basket and turned it the right way out for her, but he didn’t speak, not at first, almost to the point where she thought she was going to have to prod.
“Gabe says that thing might be walking around in Charlie,” he said, all in a rush, like he’d been thinking it over and over even longer than she had.
“Uh huh.”
“Is that what you think?”
Blue nodded. “Yeah. I do.”
Axl handed her another couple of pegs. She searched for Eli in his face and couldn’t see it – other than his height he strongly favored his mother in looks. But then he said “Good,” in a voice so clear and black and white that she feared for him; he had Eli’s assurance.
“You don’t mean that,” she said, knowing that she sinned more and more against Charlie every time she let the lie live on.
“I do. Everything went to shit when he showed up. Gloria should have done something to make him stay the f...the hell away. Seriously – she tossed him out once, didn’t she? Why’d she let him come back?”
“He was family,” said Blue. “Her family.” And mine. And the devil’s, apparently.
“Some family. Charlie used to say my dad was like his brother. Can you believe anyone could be that fucking two-faced?”
She could see he’d caught himself cursing in front of her, but she let it go. He looked perilously young all of a sudden, a child adrift. It was no time to ease her own mind by telling him that maybe ‘Charlie’ had done it because he had to, because it had needed to be done...
Axl sniffed hard. “I just want to see my mom,” he said, and started to cry.
Blue had to reach up to hug him. He felt like nothing in her arms, like a ten year old stretched overnight to almost six feet tall. He was so young he hadn’t even had time to finish learning to cry like a man, swallowing down the sobs and refusing to admit that anything was even wrong.
“Shh,” she said, because she had to. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s not. Oh God, I’m such an asshole.”
“Why? What are you talking about?”
He snorted and pulled away, wiping his eyes on the back of his skinny wrist. “I didn’t even think about how much Mom was hurting,” he said. “Because I was too busy crying about Dad, and like four months ago I didn’t even fucking know I had a dad. Like, way to forget about the one parent who actually – you know – fucking raised you and shit. I’m a terrible person.”
Blue sighed. “You are not a terrible person,” she said. “You’re human.”
“Really? I thought I was a werewolf?”
“Don’t split hairs,” she said, fishing a pack of Kleenex from her pocket. “The wolf thing is only a part time deal. Most of the time you’re human.”
“I guess.”
“Don’t guess. Know. Do the math.” Was this really what it was about? Being a wolf witch? You kissed their hurts better, soothed the kids through the pain of puberty and fired the gun when the old ones couldn’t take another full moon. Like most acts of witchcraft, it seemed like one of those mundane things that went unnoticed but kept the world turning all the same.
“I don’t know if anyone ever told you,” she said. “But my mom was sick for a long time. Bipolar disorder – it’s a mental illness. One of the very worst ones.”
“I didn’t know. That sucks. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “I spent most of my childhood counting out her medication and begging her to take it, so that she wouldn’t go off the rails again and I wouldn’t have to go back into foster care. I never really thought too much about it; kids are resilient, you know? I could almost make a game of it sometimes, staying one step ahead of social services.”
He gave her that rubbernecky look, the one she was all too familiar with, but she could forgive him for it. He was so young, after all. “Did she die in the storm?” he asked.
“No,” said Blue. “But when Katrina hit – that changed everything. We were in the Superdome for days. And that was when I realized I would have given anything to see a social worker or a counselor or any of those people I’d been trying to avoid for most of my life. That was when it stopped being a game, when I realized how it felt to be completely abandoned.”
“How old were you?”
“Younger than you. Almost fourteen. We were sleeping on sheets of cardboard, and I’d lie there at night with a backpack stuffed under my head, with all of Mom’s pills in it. There wasn’t even enough clean water – she had to dry swallow most of them and she hated that, but I had to make her take them or I knew things were going to get even worse than they already were.” She took a deep breath, crowding out the remembered stink in her head with the heavy, leafy smell of the ghostless woods. “I won’t lie, Axl. There were times when I thought it might have been easier if she’d just drowned. I actually thought that – about my own mother. So no, you’re not a terrible person. We don’t always feel the ‘right’ things when the world falls apart.”
Axl sniffed again, but this time he looked a little like he was tired of listening and wanted to skulk off back into his own world; that is to say, he looked a little better.
“Thanks,” he said, although he didn’t say it helped. He started back towards the kitchen door and then stopped, turned. “Blue?”
“Yeah?”
“Was this us?” he said. “This Yael stuff.”
“Us?”
“Did we start it?” he said. “That night when I made you play with the Ouija board?”
She’d been so absorbed in trying to cushion him from this that she forgot he’d been there at the very beginning, when Yael had hopped into the head of a nearby evangelist and killed the old lady stone dead on Gloria’s scrubby lawn. “No, honey,” she said. “T
his has been going on for a very long time. Long before either of us were even born.”
He nodded slowly and went indoors. She hung back, reluctant to admit she was avoiding Gabe. She’d left him in the basement, reinforcing cages, and the sounds of hammers and torches had gone suspiciously quiet. Someone was talking in the kitchen, but she couldn’t hear Gabe’s voice. As she peered through the stained glass she saw it was Joe, standing very close to a seated Grayson.
“...I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” Grayson was saying. “It was bad enough that fucking Ruby paved the way for the swamp wolves; what the hell am I supposed to do now that the woods really aren’t haunted any more?”
“I don’t know. Fake it ‘til you make it. Put a sheet on your head and go ‘woooo’.”
Grayson sighed and put an arm around Joe’s waist. Joe swayed easily towards him, shocking Blue with the acid green shade of her own sudden envy; how long had it been since she’d been relaxed around Gabe? She walked around with her teeth clenched in case the words fell out. Everything was so broken.
She heard Joe exhale. “For what it’s worth,” he said. “I think we gave them enough to be afraid of last time.”
Something turned chilly in the room. She saw Grayson’s hand slide off the back of Joe’s jeans, and when Joe bent to kiss him it was hard, perfunctory. “I’d better get back to it,” said Joe, and went downstairs. Blue waited for a moment, then walked in. As she rounded the kitchen table she saw that Grayson was doing something mysterious with a wine glass and a carton of eggs.
“What are you doing?” she said.
He poured water into the wine glass from a measuring jug, then cracked the egg over a basin, juggling the half shells back and forth until the white separated from the yolk. “You know how the saying goes,” he said, dropping the round, golden yolk into a ramekin. “‘When the going gets tough, the tough dig out crusty old forms of witchcraft learned at their grandmother’s knee.’”
“Haven’t heard that particular version, no.”
Grayson poured the egg white down the side of the wine glass, so that it slid into the water and sank. “Egg white divination,” he said. “Used to be all the rage with those crazy kids back in Salem, back before everyone got a bad case of the finger-pointing fever.”
He flicked open his Zippo and lit the candle in the middle of the kitchen table. “The white twists in the water if someone nearby is lying,” he said. “And keep an eye on the flame. They say it burns blue if there’s a spirit present.”
The candle burned straight and orange and ordinary. Nothing. “I guess your ghosts are gone,” she said. “Are you trying to call them back or something?”
“No,” he said. “I’m going to call Charlie.”
“How?” She stared into the flame, trying so hard to figure out how this was supposed to work that she felt her face turn hot when he took out a phone. “Oh.”
“What did you think I was going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Grease up, grab the absinthe and bust out the human ash, I guess.”
Grayson gave her an odd, avid look. “Oh my God, you actually do that?” His fanboy smile faded as quickly as it had appeared. “Does it have to be a special oil?”
“Uh...Gloria always used Noxzema.”
“Hand cream?”
“Grayson.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t never have started re-reading the Malleus Malleficarum. I’ve got weird unguents on the brain.”
“Give me the phone,” she said. There were things Charlie had to say that she couldn’t have anyone else hearing. “I’ll speak to him. What do you want me to say?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. There’s no point asking him something only Charlie would know because if Yael is there –”
“ – he’s going to have full access to Charlie’s mind. Yeah.” She imagined holding the phone to her ear and Yael somehow leaping out and burrowing back through the hole in her skull. Gloria had always sneered at the idea of a witch needing a phone. “Is this a good idea?”
“Do you have a better one?”
Blue thought of Celeste Thibodeaux - or the handful that was left of her - dusting the bottom of an urn in Gloria’s basement. Maybe, in specifying cremation, Gloria had meant Blue to use her ashes in the same way, only it was anyone’s guess where Gloria was now. In a plastic bag in a cardboard box, like the one Blue had carried to the Keys at the start of this long, weird summer.
“No,” she said. “And you’re right. We do need to know one way or the other, although Yael’s not dumb. If he wants us to believe we’re talking to Charlie then he’s not going to give the game away.”
Grayson tapped the edge of the glass with a fork. “That’s where the egg comes in. It’ll twist in the water if somebody’s lying.”
“Somebody,” she said, not sure how it worked. What if Charlie was telling the truth and Yael was lying, or vice versa? All she knew was that she pitied him more than anyone right now. Everything he’d done, or hadn’t done – it didn’t matter, because she knew what it was to have Yael under your skin.
She picked up the phone, scrolled for the number.
“Put him on speaker,” said Grayson, as it rang, but she shook her head. The last thing she’d ever do.
Just as she was about to lose her nerve and hang up, Charlie answered. Or at least his voice did.
“Hello, Sister Blue,” he said, and she thought she saw the candle flicker. “Didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“Surprise,” she said, heart in mouth.
“So. What can I do for you?”
She swallowed, barely resisting the urge to hold the phone at arm’s length. She pictured Yael dripping into her ear like poison, and realized that all the questions that had kept her awake at night had suddenly deserted her; she had no idea where to start.
“Charlie,” she said. “I know you’re in there.”
The candle flared up like a gas jet. Grayson leapt back from the table.
Yael laughed. “And you want to speak to him?” he said. “Is that it?”
“Yeah.” The flame burned blue. The egg white twisted and rose in the glass, turning opaque. “You need to let him go, Yael.”
“Not a chance,” he said. “Do you know what I’m doing right now?”
Grayson was talking about the speaker again, but she tuned him out hard and fast as soon as she heard a stifled little sob somewhere in the background.
“Ruby?” she said.
Yael laughed. “Maybe later. I like to buy a lady dinner first. Champagne and oysters. She’s having a fine old time here, aren’t you, Ruby?”
There was a short silence, then Blue heard Ruby speak – just one word, in a voice like she’d forgotten how to breathe - “Yes.” The water in the wine glass started to steam; the egg looked like it was poaching in there.
“You dumbass,” Blue said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
But the phone got snatched away before Ruby could say any more. “So what have you got going on there, Baby Blue?” said Yael, his voice like hot tar waiting for the feathers. “Bones and a mirror? Or are you kicking it old school with an egg and a glass?”
“None of your business,” she said. “Now let me speak to my brother.”
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Grayson’s wide eyes; another mess to clean up later, another pile of explanations skirting the one that she most needed to give.
Yael sighed. “Fine,” he said.
There was a pause and she strained her ears listening for Ruby, but all she could hear was ragged breathing and music in the background. It was some delicate, tinkling classical piece that tugged on threads of memory – Chopin, maybe. Or Debussy. God, why was she even thinking about this right now?
Someone made a rasping noise down the phone, the kind of noise a hostage might make. Only this wasn’t your regular hostage situation.
“Charlie?” she said
.
She heard him swallow. “I’m...okay,” he said, in a stilted, shuddering voice that said the opposite. The piano tinkled away behind him. “Everything...is...all...right.”
“Oh my God, what is he doing to you?” The spot on the side of her head itched. She all too vividly remembered her arms flailing uselessly towards the door, her body lurching and bumping against the furniture as she tried to escape Gloria’s house. An ordinary kidnapper could snip off ears and fingers and post them back to the loved ones, but Yael could pull you apart from the inside.
Charlie made another rasping sound. The glass shattered, spilling hot water and steaming egg white all over the kitchen (Clair de Lune – that was the music) and Grayson jumped back from the mess, shaking egg white from his bare toes.
“Don’t come,” said Charlie, and for the first time she was sure she was speaking to him, and not just Yael manipulating his vocal chords. “Don’t come. Stay away, Blue. Stay away.”
“No,” she said, and she that she couldn’t. She’d killed a man, but only because she had to. She wasn’t prepared to let another one just die.
“You can’t handle this,” he said. “Nobody can. Not even Gloria could – he’s strong, Blue. He’s fucking huge...”
Click. The end call signal droned in her ear.
7
The Raines house was much darker than Blue’s dreams. The big cathedral windows had been boarded up and broken through here and there, the light slanting towards the floor and making the dust motes shiver and twinkle. She stepped lightly around the edges of a mess of broken glass that might once have been a coffee table, feeling the soles of her feet tingle inside her sneakers. It was the same itchy, twitchy feeling she’d come to associate with stepping over another witch’s wards, only it also left a sticky taste in the dusty air. A licorice taste. A Yael taste.
